This past weekend we took a trip with some friends to Kiawah Island, South Carolina, a vacation spot on the Atlantic Coast.  The name of the island probably already lead you to assume that it’s a coastal locale, but my wife used to live in Grand Island, Nebraska, so a little clarification never hurts. 

Anyway, while picking up supplies at the island’s only market, I overheard some locals talking about a regional ginger ale named Blenheim.  At the time, I was scouring the soda aisle for a couple of soft drinks that are hard to find where I live: Ale-8-One and Royal Crown (in glass bottles, not the more readily available—and substandard—plastic-bottled variety).  There was no Ale-8-One or RC to be found, but I did pick up a six pack of Blenheim and bring it back to our rented condo.

When I’m traveling and I find myself in a grocery store, I usually check the soda aisle to see if they stock anything that isn’t on the shelf at my local Publix (if you’re not from Florida, Georgia, or South Carolina, you’ve probably never heard of Publix, and for that you are most unfortunate).  I guess you could say that regional soft drinks are a recent hobby of mine, though I have no idea why.  The truth is, I don’t even like soda.  Maybe it’s the caffeine.  Or maybe it’s the sweetness, me not having much of a liking for candy or desserts, either.  Or maybe it’s because of:

Traumatic soft drink memory #1: On a hot summer day in 1978, I entrusted my stepfather with my cup of iced cola, asking him to watch it for me while I ran willy-nilly around the park.  A few hours later, parched and seeking relief, I asked him for the cup back, only to discover he’d already drank its contents. 

Traumatic soft drink memory #2: Growing up, I didn’t get a cash allowance for performing my weekly household chores.  As payment, I instead was allotted a single 16-ounce bottle of Pepsi, the only soft drink I was permitted to have for the entire week (Mom has always been a proponent of healthy living).  As a result, I instinctively associate Pepsi with indentured servitude.

I could go on, but suffice to say that for various reasons related to both palette and my subconscious, soft drinks and I don’t usually mix.  What is it about rare soft drinks, then?  Maybe it’s the collectible nature of them, the same quality that spurred me to hoard baseball cards when I was a kid and vinyl toys today.  Maybe I’m drawn to their regional aspect out of some inner desire to support the little guy in a world so dominated by multinational corporations.  Maybe I just want to experience local flavor.

Who knows?  I just finished my first bottle of Blenheim #5, though, and it was, without a doubt, the gingeriest ginger ale I’ve ever had.  The taste was overpowering at first, but I got used to it by bottle’s end.  On my way to Chicago Comic-Con this year, I believe I’ll be passing close by Winchester, Kentucky, hometown of Ale-8-One ginger ale.  I’m curious to see how it compares.

I realize it’s been a while since I posted an update, but when you hear through the family grapevine that your maternal grandmother is beginning to doubt your health and wellbeing, maybe it’s been too long.

So what have I been up to?  Aside from putting the finishing touches on The Homeland Directive and reviewing the art and lettering for the adaptation of The Lightning Thief, yesterday I finished the first draft of the script for another, yet-to-be-announced graphic novel adaptation for Hyperion.  My preference is to have a complete draft of a script in the can before the artist begins penciling it, so I imposed upon myself a firm deadline of April 30, two months earlier than the deadline given to me by the editor.  Because, you know, life not being as stressful as I’d like, I try to find ways to make it more difficult.

Now it’s on to the Next Big Thing, though I haven’t quite decided what it’s going to be.  All I know is that I have about five months to do it because I’m scheduled to begin something else in October.  In other words, I set deadlines for myself before I even identify what it is that has to be completed.  Ah, neuroses . . .

Hats off to HBO Sports for their new documentary Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals, which recounts the careers of 1980s basketball legends Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird.  In my opinion, this was the heyday of pro basketball as a team sport, and it soon gave way to the points-driven, solo-performance era ushered in by Michael, handed down to Shaquille, and now ruled by Kobe and LeBron.

In the great debate of the time—Are you a Laker or a Celtic?—I came down firmly on the side of Bird and Celtics.  Growing up in South Florida during the ’80s, the only professional game in town was the NFL’s Miami Dolphins.  The Miami Heat didn’t get added to the NBA until 1988, so up to that point you had to look elsewhere for a basketball team to cheer for.  The Celtics were a natural fit for me, the majority of my family still living in Providence, Rhode Island, less than an hour from Boston Garden.  So Magic and the Lakers were to be despised for their flashy, West Coast, razzle-dazzle style of play, a polar opposite of the barebones, blue-collar, fundamental Celtic approach (though I chose the Lakers over the even less likable Detroit Pistons, whose style was driven by whiny, cheap-shot artists Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman).  As a dedicated basketball enthusiast—when I wasn’t in school or at work, I was on the court—the rivalry was a huge part of my consciousness.  I remember the Magic vs. Bird ads for Converse Weapon shoes, as well as a particularly jarring Sports Illustrated cover story where they used Photoshop (or whatever passed for Photoshop at the time) to put Bird in Laker gold and Magic in Celtic green, then surmised what the world would’ve been like had they been drafted accordingly.  Sacrilege.

The HBO documentary does a stellar job of portraying the Magic/Bird dichotomy as I remember it, but it also reveals something I hadn’t previously been aware of: the close bond of friendship that the years as bitter rivals forged between the two men.  Throughout their careers they came to depend on each other’s existence as the yardsticks by which they judged themselves, Bird checking the box score every morning to see Magic’s stats from the evening before, and Magic using Bird’s Rookie of the Year and MVP trophies to fuel his own ambition.  When Magic was forced to retire after testing HIV positive in 1991, the game lost all meaning for Bird, who soon retired himself.

I suddenly find myself wishing today’s NBA was more like the league of my youth, when players stayed with a single franchise throughout their careers, forging team identities and heated rivalries that endured.  When players played for their teams, not for themselves.  I’ve tried to watch today’s game, but every time LeBron tosses his powder in the air, I can’t reach for the remote fast enough.

Who knew a 36-year-old could be so fogeyish?

Space travel has been in the news a lot lately.  We’ll be saying goodbye to NASA’s space shuttle program later this year (a sad event for this former resident of the Space Coast), and now there is a proposal to cancel development of the Ares I rocket, the system slated to replace the shuttle and, ultimately, return Americans to the moon.  The new plan (as I understand it) will be for NASA to instead contract private companies to ferry our astronauts into space, freeing up funding for the agency to pursue loftier endeavors.  Not a bad idea in theory, but canceling our current mode of space transport—as well as future modes already under development—before another is in place will mean that, for the first time since John Glenn blasted off 48 years ago, the United States won’t have a vehicle for putting a man in orbit.  It’s a little too cart-before-the-horse for me.  Sort of like this letter, mailed to my grandfather along with his membership card for Pan Am’s “First Moon Flights” Club:

The letter isn’t dated, so I can’t be sure when it was sent, but this Los Angeles Times article claims that Pan American World Airways launched its waitlist for moon flights in the 1960s (presumably in the wake of Apollo 11).  The illustrations on the membership card feel like the ’60s, so that’s as good a guess as any.  Here’s the front:

and the back:

Conflicting statistics are reported online, but as far as I can tell the the club grew to over 90,000 members, Ronald Reagan and Walter Cronkite counted among them.  At #1,463, that makes Grandpa an early bird, and I smile at the thought of him boarding his space plane while The Great Communicator and The Most Trusted Man in America wait their turns on the tarmac.

JFK called the space program the “greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”  Who can blame James Montgomery, Vice President of Sales at Pan Am, for being exuberant about joining in the venture?  Despite the promise and entrepreneurial spirit of his letter, though, Pan Am went bankrupt in 1991, and nearly two decades later we’re still without commercial space flights.  By year’s end, our astronauts will be standing in line with Grandpa, Ronnie, Walter and the rest of the 90,000, while other countries take command of the heavens. 

For how long?

(Addendum: My uncle reports that the envelope the membership card was mailed in is postmarked April 30, 1969, nearly three months prior to Apollo 11 and Armstrong’s small step.  I’m told by my mother and grandmother that Grandpa fired off his letter to Pan Am as soon as he heard about the club, so it couldn’t have been started too much earlier.)

Cousin Joe is the eldest of my generation in the family.  My paternal grandmother cared for all of us kids during the summer breaks from school, so we spent quite a lot of time together growing up.  Joe never lacked for new and interesting ways to pass the time.  He had me convinced at a tender young age that he was a close friend of Spider-Man—who would drop by my grandmother’s single-wide now and again—and I believed him wholeheartedly despite never seeing Joe and the webslinger in the same room together.  I remember another occasion when he drew elaborate control panels on poster board, which he taped to my grandmother’s TV tables and arranged around the living room, thereby transforming it into the bridge of the Enterprise.  As the eldest, the role of Captain Kirk was his birthright.  As the youngest, I filled the seat of Chekov (or maybe it was Sulu).  When we see each other these days, I have more hair on my chin than I did then, and Joe has less hair on his head, and the world couldn’t be stranger.

Unbeknownst to me until recently, Joe now channels his fascination with the Final Frontier into astral photography.  Whenever he gets the urge, he ventures from his Southern California home and out into the desert, where he points his telescope and camera at the heavens:

I asked Joe if his photos (which can be viewed at his online gallery) are the way things really look, and he answered that it depended on what I meant (Joe majored in philosophy and religion, so you’re rarely asking him the question that you think you are).  He told me they haven’t been digitally manipulated, so in that sense, yes, they are the way things really look.  But they are the way things really look now as seen from Earth, not the way things really look now at the sources.  The light traveled from each location for up to billions of years to reach Earth, so the photographs represent how things really looked at that long-ago moment in the universe’s history, a time before the existence of telescopes or humans or even the Earth itself.

How many sci-fi stories deal with the invention of elaborate machines that allow users to witness events that occurred before their lifetime?  With his simple explanation, Joe made me realize that to make such fictions a reality, all I need to do is step outside and gaze skyward.  If I’d majored in philosophy and religion, I’d probably go off on some tangent about the triviality of a single human lifespan—no matter what the accomplishments—in the grand scheme of space and time.  Thankfully I’m merely a writer of comics, so I have no such inclinations. 

I saw this video a few weeks back as it was making its way through the news cycle, and it got me thinking about the nature of collecting and the perceived value of things:

One of my first steady jobs was working weekends at a baseball card store in the late ’80s, where I witnessed firsthand the collector’s craze that ultimately unraveled the hobby (sound familiar?).  During my employment I was taught that the proper way to handle a Mark McGwire rookie card was with clean hands and by the edges, and only for as long as it took to slide the card into a plastic sleeve.  I was told to put a short stack of Wade Boggs cards in the display case, even if we had more on hand, because if the stack was too tall, then the cards would seem less valuable.  I was made to believe that if I bought Topps, Fleer, and Donruss by the case and never broke the seal, they would someday provide the windfall that would lead to early retirement.

The owner of the store dealt in autographed sports memorabilia as well, and the events he hosted afforded me the opportunity to acquire signatures from a slew of players, including Hall of Famers such as Brooks Robinson, Willie Stargell (he let me try on his World Series ring), and even the great Joe DiMaggio.  Young as I was, I had quite the formidable collection, none of which is worth much now, the memorabilia and sports-card market having cratered long ago.    

The little Phillies enthusiast in the video has already learned at 3 what I have not at 35: My autographed baseballs were made to be thrown, not entombed in plastic cubes which are in turn entombed in a plastic bin which is in turn entombed with the rest of my life’s debris in the storage area under the stairs.  Maybe she didn’t need to learn this truth.  Maybe it’s instinctual, and my years as a hobbyist caused me to unlearn it, the same as all of the other kids I used to see working the fence line at Fort Lauderdale Yankee Stadium with their pens and backpacks full of balls and flats (for the uninitiated, the latter term refers to cards and 8×10 glossy photos).  All I know is there are at least a dozen official Major League baseballs in my house, but if aliens in pinstripe uniforms and cleats landed on my lawn and said they needed a ball to begin their game or else they were going to detonate the planet, I’d have to grab my flashlight and hope they were willing to wait.

It was a common occurrence during those years working the counter at the store, an older customer marveling at the prices of the items in our inventory, saying that when he was a kid he used to clip baseball cards to the spokes of his bike because they produced a cool clicking noise when he pedaled.  “If only I’d known how much they’d be worth some day . . . .”  I’ve never clipped cards to my spokes, but I’m confident that whatever thrill is derived from the experience is far better than staring at a cardboard box, the lid sealed tight to prevent the contents from fading in the light of day. 

Give a three-year-old a CGC-graded copy of Action Comics #1, and you know what he’d do?  Read it.

I have a 22-page story titled “The Ark” that appears in the Iron Man: Iron Protocols one-shot released today (with interior art by Nelson DeCastro and cover by Ariel Olivetti).  I wrote the story over a hectic 3-week period in January of 2008, during which time I was offered the job, I pitched my idea, and I turned in the first draft of the script.  I remember telling John Barber at Marvel that I would hit the deadline no problem, while thinking that it was actually going to be a very big problem: I already had a week-long family vacation planned during that time, and I had no prior knowledge of Iron Man beyond being able to pick him out in a costumed lineup.  I stopped at a comic book shop somewhere in North Florida to buy the recent Iron Man trades and back issues, and read most of them in the car while my wife handled the rest of the driving.  I wasn’t about to tell an editor willing to take a chance on me that I couldn’t hack it.

Seeing the story now feels a little like peeking into a time capsule.  I’ve scripted most of Flesh and Bone and three-quarters of The Lightning Thief since submitting “The Ark,” so a lot of pages were written in the interim.

Ever tried to buy an exclusive toy at Comic-Con International?  I have.

Each year, Hasbro releases a superhero-themed My Little Pony that’s sold only for the 5-day duration of the convention in San Diego.  My first attempt to obtain one such Pony in 2008 quickly degraded into a scene that can only be described as Thunderdome, but with air conditioning.  The Hasbro booth was a pushing, shoving mob of adults, most of whose members were not, I suspect, jostling for a Pony, but rather a limited Transformer or some other popular toy for eBay their curiously absent kid.  Hasbro had multiple registers running, which probably would’ve been a fine idea if there wasn’t only a single line leading to them, making me just one tiny grain of sand endeavoring to pass through the waist of the hourglass and emerge in the promised land of Checkout on the other side.  I gave up the effort, my confidence in the inherent goodness of my fellow man severely shaken.

(In order to preserve my dude cred, I’ll state for the record that the Pony was neither for me nor eBay, but a gift for a living, breathing, little girl.) 

I’m pleased to say that this year the scene was much different, Hasbro having set up a separate register solely for My Little Pony sales.  Walking up and purchasing the toy with ease as the mob jostled anew not five feet away was one of the highlights of this year’s convention for me (and it confirmed my previous year’s suspicion regarding the ratio of Pony/other-popular-toy customers).

Earlier this week at Comics Alliance, blogger extraordinaire Laura Hudson uncovered an entire subculture of My Little Pony enthusiasts who, rather than wait for Hasbro to iron out contracts with Marvel, DC, and others—or perhaps not wanting to brave the masses at Comic-Con—have taken matters into their own hands.  If Pony Han Solo frozen in carbonite doesn’t elicit a smile, then your heart is two sizes too small.

(Thanks to Leigh Walton for bringing Laura’s column to my attention.  Leigh has been there for the highs and lows of my Pony chase, seeing both the joy of 2009 and the crushing defeat of 2008.)

What, this post too cutesie for you?  Fret not, The Ugly Truth returns on Monday.

Congratulations to Greg Rucka, Steve Lieber, and the gang at Oni Press as the film adaptation of Whiteout releases today.  I enjoyed the book, so this one is on my to-do list.

Back in 2007, Chris Staros at Top Shelf received an email from Nate Duke, a Top Shelf fan living at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station, the real-life locale in Rucka and Lieber’s fictional story.  Comics, like most things I’d guess, are difficult to come by that far south, so Top Shelf sent Nate a care package containing, among other titles, a copy of the collected edition of The Surrogates.  As a thank you, Nate sent back some photos, including this one:

That’s Nate standing at Hut Point near McMurdo, holding up The Surrogates and a Free Comic Book Day edition of Andy Runton’s Owly (Andy is a good friend, and he lives only a few miles from me here in Atlanta, so it must be kismet that our books are in the shot together). 

Undoubtedly, this is as close to Antarctica as I’m ever likely to get.  Regarded as one of the most dangerous and desolate places on the planet, I can’t help wondering what drove men like Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and others to explore that region of the world.  It’s one sort of heroism to find yourself unexpectedly facing Mother Nature at her worst and persevere in spite of her, but it’s quite another to know in advance what hell she has in store for you and venture forth regardless.  So I’d like to think it was ignorance that spurred them, that they never would’ve embarked on their expeditions had they known how truly perilous the ice was going to be.  Then again, that could be pride talking because I’m reluctant to concede the glaringly obvious—they were made from far sterner stuff than I.

A common question: As a writer, where do your ideas come from?  There’s really no definitive answer—suddenly an idea for a story will pop into my head, where a moment before it didn’t exist.  In some cases there may have been a real-life topic that interested me for some time, but how and why real life crosses over into the realm of stories is as much a mystery to me as to anyone else.  I can, however, pinpoint where my inspiration to write comes from.  There a few sources, in fact, one of which is this:

According to Wikipedia, the photo, sometimes referred to as “Lunch on a Skyscraper,” was taken by Charles C. Ebbets in 1932, and the girder the men are seated on is part of what would become the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in New York City (copyright is either Charles C. Ebbets, New York Herald Tribune, or Bettman Archive).  It’s a fairly prevalent image that pops up in all kinds of places, and I’ve liked it ever since seeing it for the first time at a restaurant when I was a kid.  Aside from it being an amazing shot, it has always represented to me the idea that everyone has a story to tell.  No matter how everyday someone’s everyday life may seem, there are events and experiences that make that life theirs and theirs alone.

I paid tribute to these eleven laborers with a bit of dialogue from SteepleJack in The Surrogates (Page 46 of the collected edition, for those following along at home).  Wizard reprinted the page in their “Secret Stash” column for issue #166, one of the first print reviews of the book.  I had the article framed as a table display for conventions, and once it outlived its usefulness I hung it on the wall of my office.  It wasn’t until years later, as I was showing the Wizard piece to a reporter who’d come by to interview me, that I realized I had unwittingly hung the article right beside my framed version of the Skyscraper print.  Just one of those events of happenstance that reinforces my belief that the subconscious is usually hard at work while the conscious mind is sleeping at the switch.

(Side Note: As far as tributes to Ebbets’ famous photo go, you’ll be hard-pressed to find one better than this.)

For a few years my family lived in Port St. John, Florida, part of an area known as the Space Coast because of nearby Kennedy Space Center.  I was shooting pool at a bar one night with a guy whose name is lost to me now, and when I asked him what he did for a living, he said he was a janitor (pursuing a career in the “custodial arts,” as Judd Nelson snidely remarked in The Breakfast Club).  Big deal, right?  Well this guy, as it turned out, was a janitor at NASA.  He worked in the Vehicle Assembly Building where the space shuttles are prepped for launch, and as an employee of NASA he was able to watch the launches from a restricted location much closer to the pad than anywhere the general public had access to.  This was over a decade ago, and I don’t recall how many countries had active space programs at the time.  Regardless, there certainly weren’t many places on the planet where one could be in close proximity to a space vehicle of any type, much less a shuttle orbiter, arguably the pinnacle of mankind’s technological achievement.  And here this guy was emptying trash bins next to them on a daily basis. 

Everyone has a story to tell.

I’ll be back on Monday with the introductory installment of this website’s third recurring feature, (un)scripted.